A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?

[Adam Back]

On Mon, May 12, 2003 at 03:46:05PM -0400, Bill Sommerfeld wrote:
> So, what's my reason to accept a "payment in cpu time"?  As best as I
> can tell, a "payment in cpu time" means that someone *else* doesn't
> get a payment in cpu time with their spam.  I still get the spam.

In the short term (when hardly anyone is sending hashcash tokens)
accepting a payment means that you exempt it from your other filtering
rules, which means that your filters are less likely to accidentally
delete mail you wanted to read.

Your reason to send hashcash tokens is to make it less likely that the
recipient's filters will accidentally delete your mail.

> It seems analagous to a protocol that proves that someone burned a
> dollar bill.

Very analogous.

> A scheme where I actually get something of value might have a bit more
> traction..

I think I agree that a real cashable payment for 0.1c would be
preferable; however the infrastructure to support it is many orders of
magnitude harder to setup.  It will also likely have to be run as a
business because of the setup and ongoing hierarchically organized
infrastructure costs.  And it's not clear it will profitably scale
down to payments that low.  And if there is real money on your machine
you'll start to see viruses attempting to steal that money.  Also the
payment system better support privacy or email privacy would have just
disappeared.

Adam